Like everyone who wells up when he towels champagne off himself with the union jack, I was shocked to see Lewis Hamilton crop up in the Paradise Papers. Among other eye-rollers, the Formula One world champion is accused of a tax avoidance scheme that involved him renting his own £16.5m private jet from himself. Is it worse than Bono? I don’t know. I’ll tell you when my sedation wears off.
For now, the shock has given way to two major concerns. The first is that this might be a bit of a pisser as far as Lewis’s bid for a knighthood goes. My own view is that titles are always rather silly, but others are naturally welcome to disagree, and we do know that Lewis has long had designs on one. Only last week, as he became Britain’s most successful F1 driver of all time, he was eyeing a visit to Buckingham Palace in the New Year’s honours. “I have been trying to represent England the best way I can,” Lewis explained, “and if that is at some stage recognised by the Queen I would be incredibly honoured.”
As for the actual honorific, he joked: “I would enforce it on everyone. Friends, everyone. I have friends who are Sirs and I call them Sir. It’s unique, why not enjoy it?” Well, quite. And what an enhancement it would be to the already hugely appealing atmosphere of Formula One to gain a Sir Ben Kingsley character, formally requiring everyone within the perimeter fence to Sir him. If done properly, it would add several seconds to the pit stop but so what? Some things are bigger than sport.
My second concern is for Monaco, the principality that Lewis has called home for many years and which never gets any credit for all the great talents it homes, be they sportsfolk like him or retail associates like Sir Philip Green’s wife, Tina. Monaco offers so much to those who opt to make it their home – but not quite enough, it seems, to get them to renounce their birth country over which they chose it.
Thinking about these two problems, I wondered if some elegant solution to both might not be found. Couldn’t Monaco’s slightly Mickey Mouse royal family invent some slightly Mickey Mouse titles to give to its most famous residents? That way they would feel the ties that bind with the place they live in, rather than keep having to pretend they’re part of Britain – a country they love, just not enough to pay for things like roads or schools or hospitals in it.
Instead of fannying around waiting to be a mere Sir over here, Lewis could easily be made the Duke (Duc?) of whichever luxury apartment block he lives in over there. He couldn’t be given his entire Monte Carlo ward, Fontevielle – I note that serious titles would also have to be found for spitting-distance neighbours Boris Becker, Ken Bates, the Barclay brothers, Lewis’s former team-mate Nico Rosberg and various other retired F1 drivers and deracinated fauxlanthropists. But I’m sure an appropriate honours system could be devised.
Then again, I suppose the worry with ennobling people in a state less than a square mile in total size is that they might in due course factionalise and overthrow you. One minute he’s just local driver Lewis Hamilton. The next, whoever has come to be seen as Monte Carlo’s Warwick the Kingmaker – probably Tina Green – is filling his head with the notion that he’s stalled in his current role and needs to think bigger. (A lot like what happened when he went to Mercedes.)
Anywayt’s a short step from that to a civil war in which none of us could possibly stomach picking a side, other than to say we hoped all Monte Carlo’s vast army of servants would be allowed to flee before the gazillionaires started killing each other. So, yes, having talked it through with you, I see the flaw with my plan. The House of Grimaldi has done very well running Monaco without uppity nobles since 1297 and there is no earthly reason to start now.
Which brings Lewis’s advisers back to his other title options. At this stage, I suspect they are limited to sports personality of year. For lo, that time is almost upon us again. Like all lovers of merriment, I welcome the secular signs of Christmas approaching, which are becoming as full of festive promise as the Christingles and wreaths of yore. And one such advent marker is the tradition of people saying someone can’t be considered sports personality of the year because they haven’t got a personality. Incidentally, in the interest of facts, the award was named in an era when people were routinely referred to as television personalities or radio personalities simply by virtue of the fact that was their milieu. It was never a reference to character.
Still, as the two-times Spoty winner Nigel Mansell once did, Lewis Hamilton features frequently in these misplaced debates about his possession or otherwise of a personality. But I hope he will be exempt this year, and forever onwards. After all, you simply cannot say that a man who writes THAT poem to Princess Diana lacks a personality. You simply cannot say a man worth £130m and counting – yet still avoids £3.3m of tax on a £16.5m private jet – lacks a personality. No, Lewis Hamilton absolutely has a personality and the Paradise Papers should force the last remaining people who claim he doesn’t to adjust their records accordingly.
